


Crack'd in a Hundred Shivers

by Gileonnen



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gaslamp Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Clockwork Creatures, Gen, Magic and Sovereignty, good dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 13:24:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12109653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: Everyone says that Richard II is dead, so it must be true. But Edward of Aumerle knows a little of the magic to which their family is heir, and he knows better than to trust what everyone says.





	Crack'd in a Hundred Shivers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Duchess-of-York](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Duchess-of-York).



Early spring hadn't yet touched the woods around Pontefract Castle with green. The last, harsh winter had stripped the trees bare, and now they stood black against the dull slate sky. Beneath Edward's feet, the earth was slick with dead leaves and soaked with snowmelt.

He wrapped his dog's leash more tightly around his hand. The season for wild hunts had long since ended, but there was nonetheless an eldritch quality to the wood that he misliked. This seemed the sort of forest that closed over lost people like a grave.

"Do you smell anything, girl?" he asked without much hope. They had already canvassed the woodlands nearer the road, but the combination of horse scent and macadam and the long winter's snow had left little for Holdfast to find.

Once more, Edward leaned down to offer Richard's handkerchief, still redolent with lavender and woodruff. Holdfast dutifully trotted over to take the scent. Her white nose and paws were almost black with mud.

For a moment, she cast about in a circle with her nose to the ground, then suddenly her body went taut and she pulled Edward deeper into the wood. When a hound found a scent, the rest of the world fell away, and she became an instrument as clean and simple as a blade. With Richard's scent before her, Holdfast was an arrow loosed. _He really was here,_ thought Edward, with a thrill of elation. _However briefly--at least that was no convenient fiction._

Deeper they went, away from the road and the castle, and still Holdfast moved as though the way lay straight before her. She passed through thickets of hawthorn tipped with translucent buds, between ancient yews and rowans, over gullies choked with broken boughs and foul, rotting leaves. Dread began to mount in Edward as the terrain grew wilder. Surely old Northumberland would not have brought Richard to this desolate place if he meant him to live.

Then Holdfast cleared a tall log with a flying leap, and Edward had to slow down to scramble over. The rotting wood and grey lichen rubbed off on his hands and his neat wool trousers; his pocketwatch fell free and lay golden and shining on the ground.

When he straightened again, now brushing off the watch, he saw that Holdfast had led him to a standing stone.

Cold passed over and through him, as though a cloud had covered the sun. It looked like nothing so much as a tombstone.

Edward made himself walk a slow circuit around the stone, searching for clothing or the telltale gleam of bone. On his second pass, he looked for sunken earth that might suggest a shallow grave. All the while, Holdfast watched him with her ears pricked and her tongue lolling peacefully from her mouth.

On the third pass, Edward found the end of a cigarette.

He knelt and began to dig with his hands. Beneath layers of dead leaves, nearly disintegrated from long exposure to the elements, he found a handful of spent cigarettes and a packet with a laughing, doe-eyed woman on it. _Mistress Tearsheet's Premium Certified,_ it said in letters worn almost beyond legibility. _With commemorative coronation print. London, 1896._

Last year. The year of the rebellion, the fall of the old king and the rise of the new.

"The trail can't really end here, can it?" asked Edward. He offered the handkerchief again. Holdfast gave it another sniff, then gave a low, agreeable bark and wagged her tail.

He looked to the standing stone, but its bare grey face held no answers. Richard hadn't vanished into a fairy mound or some druids' folly, no matter what stories Aunt Isabella used to tell about the fey-touched Angevins. Their family's gifts were far simpler.

 _Where is he, then, that damnable riddle of a man?_ thought Edward. _Nowhere and everywhere._

Still meditating on his cousin's disappearance, Edward tucked the cigarette package back into his pocket. He tugged lightly on the leash, then turned his steps toward the castle.

It was time to visit the chamber where (so they said) King Richard II had died.

* * *

Pontefract Castle's guardians were clockwork creatures of blades and gears, and they moved with a strange, spider-like scuttling that made Edward's skin creep. Each one wore a mask of metal that had been hammered into the shape of a human face. "My name is Edward," he told the two guardian creatures that flanked the doorway. "Duke of Aumerle."

The guardians spoke in a harsh, clicking language, but speak they did. _You have been granted passage,_ they said. Their metal faces remained unmoving, unmoved. _You will be escorted._

"Thank you," he answered. "I'd like to see the cell where the king died."

 _King Henry lives,_ they told him.

"Where Richard Plantagenet died, then," he said, and this, they seemed to accept. The creatures moved to shadow him as he entered, dozens of brass legs tapping across the flagstones.

Down they went, into the lightless dungeons at the castle's root. The halls were dry--to keep the clockwork guardians from degrading, he supposed--but there was nonetheless a pervasive, human stink to the place that made Edward want to recoil. He coughed and brought Richard's handkerchief to his nose, fortifying himself against the smell of rot and waste.

The cell to which they took him was no more than six feet on a side, barely large enough for Richard to have stretched to his full, considerable height. In the dim light of the gaslight in the hall, Edward saw that someone had carved the walls with what must have been a spoon, picking out a myth of cosmogenesis on the bare stone.

He stepped inside. Holdfast whined and tucked her tail, lingering at the door. "It's all right, my girl," he told her, but she would not be cajoled to join him.

 _So be it._ Edward knelt by the wall and pressed his hand over the carvings, feeling each shallow line beneath his palm. He had only a little of his family's gift, that queer prickling art that remade the world in star and shadow--but Richard's gift had been great, and he had been building a world here in this room. If nothing else, the room would remember what it had witnessed.

Edward closed his eyes and let his mind go clear as glass, and he listened.

_"--thoughts tending to ambition," said Richard. His voice was absent, inattentive. Dismissive. A scrape of metal on rock. "They do plot unlikely wonders."_

_Sudden laughter, a voice not-quite-familiar. "These vain, weak nails may tear a passage through the flinty ribs of this hard world."_

_"My ragged prison walls? And, for they cannot, die in their own pride."_

_A murmuring voice; a low conversation, whispers brushing like feathers on the shell of Edward's ear. Then the clicking, stuttering speech of the clockwork creatures--_ Hail, royal prince!-- _and the world fractured into shards of glassy darkness and sliced itself bloody at the edges._

Edward reeled back, clutching his ears. When he dared to pull his hands away, he saw that his palms were bloody. Holdfast leapt into the cell with him and licked his face, and he lost many long minutes in soothing himself against her fur.

 _Are you satisfied with your inquiries?_ chattered one of the clockwork guardians, when at last Edward rose to his feet.

He looked down again at the carvings on the wall, and he only said truthfully, "I have more questions now than I did when I began."

* * *

For the Black Prince's untimely death, Edward had heard that London wore mourning for a year. The funeral procession had wound for miles through the city streets, a long black river of carriages and soldiers in ordered ranks. Shopkeepers had put up black crepe in the windows, and urchins had sold white flowers for somber men to pin to their lapels.

For Richard, though, there hadn't even been a public funeral. Edward had simply awakened one day to a world that knew Richard had starved to death in a castle in a deep wood, and then that world had rolled on.

As he strode the streets of London with his hat pulled low, the petty dramas of ordinary lives unfolded all around him. Students shared newspapers on a street corner, crowding around a reader with a clear, belling voice. Butchers brushed flies from cooling meat. A woman scrubbed the windows of the Boar's Head Inn, her washrag caked with soot and lime.

It didn't feel real. He didn't feel real--if he took a sharp left turning, Edward thought that he might step out of his body entirely. _Even if I told them about the stone in the wood, or the way that horrid cell echoed, who would believe me? I'd sound a perfect madman. And perhaps I am, at that._

The woman's cloth swiped across the final window pane. Through the window of the inn, a blur of colors and shapes suddenly resolved into a printed advertisement for Mistress Tearsheet's Premium Certified Cigarettes.

Edward blinked. His hand went to the pocket that held the cigarette packet. "Excuse me," he said to the woman with the washrag. "Do you sell Mistress Tearsheet's here?"

"I do, sir," she said, and made a quick curtsy. "One of the only places in the city that does, sir, as Mistress Tearsheet is a dear friend of mine. Sweet Jesu, she's a goodly woman, Doll Tearsheet."

For a moment, the rushing world seemed to still, as though a storm passing over had caught Edward in its eye. Then he smiled and said, "I have no pressing business today, and I find myself in want of strong coffee and a cigarette. May I come inside?"

* * *

As the lamplighters made their rounds, people drifted into the common room of the Boar's Head Inn--working men with rough red hands and muttonchop beards, women from the factories and the flower stalls who smelled of iron and lilac, poets and luminaries now dimmed by misfortune. By then, Edward had ensconced himself in a corner armchair with a good view of the room, where he slowly drained a cup of bitter coffee. For the most part, the other patrons paid him no mind.

He watched strangers flow and ebb, constellate in conversations, break for drinks or disputation. There, disgraced Sir Jack Falstaff held court over a knot of well-dressed ne'er-do-wells, recounting the sorry story of how footpads had stolen his wallet. There, Mistress Quickly paused to whisper in the ear of a woman with wide brown eyes, whom Edward recognized from the cigarette packet. There, a serving-boy rushed from table to table, begging a thousand pardons.

There was a pattern to their movements that he couldn't quite make out. Some unspoken understanding that they all seemed to share that guided their steps and their words, as though they were a river breaking around some barely-submerged stone.

In this place where everyone strove desperately to be seen and heeded, someone else had come to _see_ , and the world bent itself to his gaze.

When Edward looked again to Jack's young friends, at last, he understood.

He rose from his chair and strode across the room. Even now, it was strangely difficult to keep his eyes on Prince Hal; his attention glanced away, sluicing to either side like rain from a peaked roof. _Family art, no doubt._ "Excuse me, sir," said Edward, carefully laying a hand on Sir Jack's shoulder. "I need to speak with my cousin."

Hal looked up with pale eyes, and one corner of his lips quirked slightly. "Of course, Cousin," he answered. "I believe we're all thoroughly sick of this performance. Wouldn't you agree, Jack?" Then he tossed a well-made wallet on the table like a trump card and rose from his seat, gesturing Edward to the door.

Beneath the streetlights, Hal's eyes gleamed like a cat's. "Come to beg me to amend my ways?" he asked coolly.

"You seem to know your business better than I do. I wish you the joy of your ways." Edward thrust his hands into his pockets, wishing he had another cigarette to occupy his fingers. "I've come to ask you about the stone in the wood outside Pontefract."

"The cigarettes," Hal guessed, at which Edward nodded. "I suppose it's no good pretending to you that I wasn't there."

"You were certainly there, and so was Richard. Someone spoke to him in his cell and told him ..." Edward tried to remember. "Someone told him, 'these vain weak nails may tear a passage through the flinty ribs of this hard world.' I wasn't sure what that meant. I'm still not sure. But his trail ends at that stone, and I think you know why."

"I may." They were, Edward realized, walking toward the river. He could hear the distant sound of riverboats' bells. "The king is dead. Everyone knows it. Long live the king."

"It's queer, how everyone knows it," said Edward slowly. "As though we'd all heard it from someone, somewhere. A notice in the papers, perhaps. Gossip from a friend. But I don't recall reading anything in the papers, after his death."

"There must have been, mustn't there? Even a king like Richard doesn't die without history marking his passing."

"Our family has a gift--"

Hal snorted. "And who gave us that gift, I wonder? Was there ever a price to it, in days we've long since forgotten? They used to say that a king's touch can heal the sick, but no one has told that story for a very long time. I wonder what changed?"

"We became less credulous."

"We stopped pretending we wanted miracles." Hal paused at the mouth of an alley to light a cigarette. It took Edward a moment to realize he hadn't actually struck a match. "You want a miracle from me, don't you? You want me to bring King Richard back to life, like Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus."

When Edward held out his hand for another cigarette, Hal passed one over. "I think we both know that he never died."

"An interesting theory. What happened to him, then, if he never died?"

"That's what I hope you'll tell me."

Hal breathed out a cloud of smoke. The lamplight caught its edges as it drifted in slow spirals toward the sky. "You've some skill at investigation, Cousin, but you've only given me observations. You haven't yet asked a question. Go on, then. Ask. Choose your question carefully--I'm only disposed to answer one."

 _Where is Richard?_ Edward wanted to ask, but he swallowed it down. If he could only ask one question, then it booted him nothing to know where Richard was without any promise of ever finding him. His mouth felt very dry. The ships' bells were loud in his ears.

He looked into Hal's queer, bright eyes, and he asked, "Why are you leading me to the river?"

Hal gave a faint, genuine smile and clapped him on the shoulder. "Why, my dear cousin, I'm going to tear a passage through the flinty ribs of this hard world."

* * *

On the stinking shore of the Thames, where the muck lay a foot and a half thick, Hal stood a moment with his eyes half-lidded and one hand extended before him. He seemed to feel through the fetid air, until at last his fingers closed as though on an invisible length of fishing line. As Edward watched, Hal wrapped his hand in that line and _pulled._

The slow-moving water stilled until it was as flat and reflective as a mirror. For a moment, Edward smelled orange blossoms and felt a warm breeze kiss his cheek. On the water's surface, Edward glimpsed the sickle moon flitting through wisps of cloud. "I'm not sure what you've shown me," he said, no more than a breath of sound. "Although it's certainly an impressive trick."

"Look up," suggested Hal.

Above them, the sky was cloudless and clear. Edward looked down again at the moon amid a sea of vapors, and he ventured, "That's another sky."

"An impressive trick," Hal repeated, a smug note creeping into his voice. "And for your gift, I'll even let you join Richard beneath that sky."

 _Was there ever a price to it?_ Hal had asked, as though he hadn't already discovered the answer. "So that was why you did it--not for love of Richard. Not because what your father did to him was unjust. For a load of parlor tricks."

"For my birthright." Hal's gaze was clear and steady. "For the gift I'm heir to."

Edward looked into the deep well of the sky, feeling the cold spring wind slicing through his shirt collar and tugging at his hair. "What happens if I accept? The world remembers my death, without quite remembering how they knew it in the first place?"

"I can arrange that. If you want to have died nobly on some foreign battlefield, a dying comrade clutched in your arms--"

"No," said Edward quietly. "No, I couldn't do that to my family. They've had sorrows enough for two lifetimes."

"Then I'll let them remember that you went away for your health. To a cottage in the wood, where you could hunt and finish that book you keep saying you mean to write."

"And will I? Where will I go, if I step through this door of yours? A cottage in the wood, or the abyss?"

"That would be telling, wouldn't it." Hal's eyes gleamed. "Choose quickly, cousin. I can only hold the world's ribs apart a little longer before they break."

Edward's chest hurt. He recognized dimly that it was because he had forgotten to breathe. Everything he longed for might be on the other side of that strange, ephemeral passageway; Richard might be there, whole and hale and desperately lonely. They might be able to make a life together on the other side, when the world had rolled on without them.

Or there might be nothing beyond but the void. "I'll have to decline," Edward said at last. "Thank you for the offer."

Hal withdrew his hand, and slowly, the Thames began to flow again. "Then farewell, my friend. I hope you don't come to regret this choice."

Edward stepped back from the water and climbed back to the street. "I don't think I will. Farewell," he said, "and long live the king."

* * *

On the deck of a steamboat, Edward sat with his trunk at his side and Holdfast curled up at his feet. Her paws twitched as she slept, as though in her dreams she was chasing hares across green meadows.

"I think you'll like France, old girl," Edward told her, leaning down to scratch between her ears. "Good countryside for running."

 _And for hiding._ He unfolded a map of France over his lap, with the orange-growing regions outlined in red ink and the ancestral Angevin lands marked in blue.

In the one of the places where blue and red overlapped, there would be a standing stone, and Edward meant to find it.


End file.
